Mac Pranks for April Fools Day

It’s April Fools today, which means the world is full of pranksters and the internet is largely useless and filled with outrageous stuff. We’ll do our part but try to still be useful (sort of), so with this in mind here are some Mac pranks that are fun to pull on April Fools, or any day:

Fake Kernel Panic – this looks and behaves like a real kernel panic, except it’s not one. This will ruin someones day, so be sure to tell them it’s a joke before they start reinstalling the Mac OS X or calling AppleCare

Stick things to a MacBook Pro – all Mac portables have built-in magnets that are surprisingly strong. Scissors, pens, coins, ear buds, you name it and it’ll probably stick to their screen

Take a Screenshot of their Desktop and then set that as their desktop wallpaper – this is hilarious and fools nearly everyone, watch as they try to move icons and windows that are part of the background picture

Rotate their screen orientation – flip someones monitor 90° or 180° vertically and enjoy the confusion, to make matters more confusing this flips the mouse too

Invert the display colors – This is quick to implement and reverse, just hit Command+Option+Control+8 and the screen colors will be inverted

5 Comments

I did the screenshot gag early in my OS8/9 years. there was also an app back then that operated like a virus check. It ran a “check” and “deleted” the entire contents of the disk, then rebooted to a bad volume icon. I loaded that on every designer’s Mac back in about 1998. Only one Mac didn’t come back.